Matthew Buchanan

Content standards in design systems support a holistically consistent user experience. They also build collaboration between writers, designers and engineers. https://lnkd.in/gVRepdfi Nielsen Norman Group #contentdesign #designsystems #contentstrategy

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Are you a designer wanting up to £80k for a people-centred and/or systemic project? One of the biggest barriers we have found to designers to design for planet is project funding and budgets. So here is a way to fund some of your self-created briefs!

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Figma. So big a deal that Adobe tried to buy it, but couldn't. You don't HAVE to know how to use Figma to be in the digital space...but you sure do have to know people who DO know how and when (and when not) to use it. Simon Mateljan and Kevin Cyr have teamed up to create a Perth Friends of Figma group, and have announced the first face to face event. Benjamin Low and Min Sheen Tan will be bringing their takes on how Figma's unique groove plays out in different production contexts. As usual, talking about the software leads to discussions about workflow processes and project problem solving. I have my ticket already booked! https://lnkd.in/g4wNsmPb #telstrapurple, #UXUI, #Figma, #design

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Check out one of my favourite clips from my chat with Brad Orego. There's so much value for UX Research in connecting with teams outside of Product and UX/Design. Listen to the full episode. 👇🏾 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gvpcpX5T #uxresearch #userresearch

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Question. Is it feasible to freelance as a UX / Technology consultant? I believe my years and experience has put me in some hairy situations and successful executions across a spectrum of technologies. I believe I could help organizations large and small. But is that even a line of work? Is a UX focussed efficiencies and strategy freelance / consultant even something companies are looking for on the market?

It's exciting to be a part of exceptional UX workshops. When they aren't exceptional, it can be painful. In last week's Next Mile blog post, we outline some of the key things we've seen go wrong and how they might be avoided. #ux #workshop #experience #oy

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I wanted to spend some time considering the business case for accessibility. I remember reading somewhere that people, on average, tell five other people about an experience they have. Consider this scenario. I decide I want to head to sunny Queensland for a holiday. I need to book accomodation and find a site that is accessible and easy to use. Because I didn’t spend all of my energy trying to navigate the site, the accomodation is booked in no time. I tell five friends and family about my experience and they subsequently use the same site to book their holidays. They tell five people, who tell five people. You get the picture. It is important to remember that telling five people isn’t restricted to people who are blind so potential to gain business because of this experience is across the population at large. Now let’s look at a scenario that actually happened. I needed to purchase more 4Cyte for my retired Guide Dog. I use a site called 99petshops.com.au which does a nice job of listing product prices from low to high. I found the product and the lowest price (if factoring in shipping) was on the PetPA site. I was able to successfully choose the size of the product I was after and add it to my cart but unfortunately I was not able to check out. Some of the issues I encountered included: 1. heading levels that were not presented in a hierarchical order, affecting ability to understand relationships of items on the page. 2. links that are images with no alternative text and 3. a “cart” button that I could not seem to activate with a screen reader. From what I could ascertain during the limited time I was on the site, they used ARIA in a creative way. My screen reader automatically made an announcement when somebody purchased a product. I can see the marketing value in this, but it unfortunately added to the busy nature of the page. Generally speaking, I have limited time to navigate barriers and it is my policy to explore comparable options if access is an issue. How could sites presenting these issues be designed in a way promoting access? 1. Add text to image links. Image links can be useful when there are language or learning barriers. 2. Add alternative text to the images or hide them to a screen reader, depending on the context. 3. Make sure that all elements of the page can be accessed by a keyboard. 4. Work with designers within your sector who create accessible designs. 5. Carry out market research and get feedback on the usability of the page. 6. Enjoy the profits as people share their positive experiences and business increases.

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About a year ago I wrote a post about design/experience principles (see the link in comments) which had a fantastic set of responses on how to use them. If you're working on design principles or thinking of doing so, I'd encourage you to have a read. They've recently come up again with clients – from a scaling and embedding across an org perspective. Some of my thoughts: 1. People support what they help create 👏 Number one rule of embedding anything – without buy-in it won't go very far. So if you're building design or experience principles, include key teams and stakeholders in their creation, ideally based on data and evidence. 2. Align with measurable outcomes the org cares about 📊 Any principle you develop should ultimately connect with the strategic goals of the organisation. That means you should identify success measures for each principle and develop a plan for tracing outcomes back to decisions you made in the design process. Sounds obvious, but it takes perseverance to do well. 3. Determine ownership and accountability across teams 📋 Develop an operating model that embeds your principles into everyday practices across different teams (not just design). When are they going to be created, updated or reviewed? How are principles going to be used to shape scope and make decisions across marketing, technology, product or risk? Make it your job to figure this out. 4. Scale and build evidence from small successes 🌱 Embedding principles everywhere at once, at scale is hard. Small examples of successful change based on your principles is a good strategy if you're starting from zero. In the past we've seen success around small things like web copy changes that can easily be measured and involve multiple stakeholders from the outset. 5. Find your champions 🎉 It's good to identify people in the organisation from diverse areas that believe in, and are passionate about making your principles work. See No.1 on this list! 6. Integrate with other frameworks 🧩 Principles never sit on their own. They work alongside other governance frameworks and practices. Part of an embedding strategy for experience principles should involve defining how they ladder up to other standards in the organisation. What do you think? What have you seen working when it comes to the adoption and strategic value of experience/design principles? Or is there a better way to drive quality and integrity in customer experiences? #strategy #innovation #transformation Nile

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On #BraveUX this week, Jakob Nielsen addresses some of the criticism he’s faced 🎤, calls on UXers to urgently adopt AI 🐛, and shares why he believes the commoditisation of UX is a good thing 📈. Highlights include: ⭐ Are you surprised by how much you’ve offended some people? ⭐ Why do UXers need a greater sense of urgency about adopting AI? ⭐ Were the hiring practices at your previous company elitist? ⭐ What is the state of UX today and where is the growth potential? ⭐ Will AI impede our ability to develop our professional judgement? Plus much more! - - - - - 📺 Want to watch or listen 🎧 to the episode? 👉 Find the links in the comments, or search for Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis 🇺🇦 on YouTube or on your favourite podcast platform. - - - - - Who is Jakob Nielsen, PhD? Jakob is the founder of UX Tigers 🐯, the website and associated substack he uses to bring his 41 years of UX knowledge and experience to the world, in what he has described as a plainspoken, hard-hitting and not bowing to orthodoxy kind-of-way. Before founding UX Tigers, Jakob was the co-founder and principal - for 25 years - of a rather well known UX consultancy, the Nielsen Norman Group 📜. His other notable roles include being a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a member of the research staff at Bell Communications Research 🔔 - one of the world’s top three HCI labs in the 1990s. Jakob is known for many other things, among which are being the founder of the discount usability movement, the foundational 10 usability heuristics for user interface design, and the eponymously named Jakob’s Law of Internet User Experience 🏛️. He is the holder of no less than 79 United States patents and the author of 8 books, including the best-selling “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity”, “Usability Engineering”, and the pioneering “Hypertext and Hypermedia” 📚. In 2013, Jakob received the Lifetime Achievement Award for HCI Practice from ACM SIGCHI and in 2024 he was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 🏆. - - - - - Don’t forget to check out the show notes on YouTube for quick-access to interview chapters, as well as where to find Jakob. #UX #UXDesign #UXAI #UXR #UXResearch #UserResearch #DesignLeadership #UXTigers

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Sharing this beautiful bite-size article from James Ferguson on maximising your design system, with a sneak peak of the new app design my team and I have been busy conjuring this year ✨ #DesignLeadership #DesignSystems #AppDesign

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So true. As a junior/mid-level designer, I fell into the trap of just listing what I did, like: - Creating ads, landing pages, mockups, and branding for different companies - Developing prototypes, wireframes, conducting usability tests, and leading workshops These tasks are often considered table stakes. People expect you to know them if you are a designer. Now, I focus on the impact of my work: - In UX, for example, we mitigate risk by researching and testing upfront, saving significant time and effort. - For graphic and visual designers, the question is: how much traffic, conversions, or awareness did our work generate? - Process improvements matter too. For instance, in one company, I noticed our file structure was messy. By reorganizing it, we could easily find what we needed without relying on the people who maintained it. I also love the reminder about the process. There isn't a perfect design process; it evolves and should allow for exceptions. For example, if the task is to create a button, but part of the process is to write a ticket that describes the issue, and it takes two weeks or even months to get prioritized, it can be inefficient. If a designer can complete that task in one minute, wouldn't it be a good idea to have a conversation about it? Let me know your thoughts 🤣. But beyond being a designer, I'm also a person. Some know me as Anne, Chie, or Danica. I enjoy pineapples on my pizza, watercolour painting, and playing Overwatch. So my Sunday reminder is: Be kind to yourself. The world of design is constantly evolving. There are countless resources available on LinkedIn, shared generously by the community. It can be overwhelming to allocate time to absorb all this knowledge 🤣. To my younger self, who didn't know better: I appreciate your effort. I wish someone had told me to be more strategic (and learned how to do it), but there's also value in focusing on quantity. Some people learn best by doing, "putting in the reps" and creating a large volume of work. This process hones our skills. I may not have seen the impact of my work back then or could articulate, collaborate, and address significant needs, but now I do. This makes me a better designer. #design

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💥 Dropping this visual essay which is based on my talk at UX+ Conference Manila last year. It's a good way to catch up on the talk - but in written format. It covers a bunch of stories and practical lessons explaining what UX principles are and how to write them. 💪🏽 Do have a look and DM me any feedback or comments I would love to know what you think thanks so much!! #design #ux #writing #uxprinciples

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Will I ever stop talking about the business value of design? NEVER. Designers are under selling themselves if they don't know how to connect the dots. It only took me first half of my career working directly with founders to build business through different stages, plus 7 years to build my own side hustle from nearly drain out my life savings to turning over multi six figures to figured out:👇 Designers absolutely need to know more than design to succeed in the business eco system. so where do you even start? All will be revealed in this session. Warning: this talk will be filled with relationship analogies. come for a laugh 😂 ✌️🌈🚀 #businessdesign #designcareer #productdesign #uxdesign

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Next week. I'm talking about disconnection of business and design Atlassian Sydney. Looking forward to share few nuggets about getting these two to talk to each other. Thank you for the crew behind the scene Kevin Wilkins, Lydia Bradshaw, Sylvia Luk, Ashlee King, Sarah Stokes, Tim Dixon, PhD, Timothy Parker for organising. Reminder for everyone, I also run a half day in bootcamp on 21st JUNE in Sydney on - Mastering Business Acumen for Designers. Link in comment. 💬🔗 #businessdesigner #productdesigner #productstrategy

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ok, so I've been playing with ChatGPT 4o and thinking about a recent team retro after a product release...and then I went down a Dylan Thomas rabbit hole while scanning twitter and then this happened: From ChatGPT, here's a poem inspired by Dylan Thomas's style, about working on a Product team: Agile Lights, UX Nights Do not go gentle into that sprint's close, Refine the user flow, iterate and fight; Rage, rage against the backlog’s imposed woes. Though wise UXers know the user's woes, Their insights flash like wireframes in the night, Do not go gentle into that sprint's close. Good designers, the last click's deed we compose, Lamenting features lost to budget's tight, Rage, rage against the backlog’s imposed woes. Wild creatives who caught and sang their prose, In personas wild, and crafted journeys bright, Do not go gentle into that sprint's close. Grave researchers, near the end, their insights pose, With data rich, refining all that's right, Rage, rage against the backlog’s imposed woes. And you, my product team, with fervor rose, Bless me now with sprints of agile might, Do not go gentle into that sprint's close. Rage, rage against the backlog’s imposed woes.

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☀️ Summer is just about here, and we have some great episodes coming ahead. Today, PJ Onori and I talk about starting to say NO to more things as we mature our systems. We’ve spoken at length about ensuring we map all work back to business goals of the org, but on this ep we use examples of contributions as something that can go wrong when not providing the same level of resourcing. There’s no shortcuts to doing good work. https://lnkd.in/gJpHkyAS #designsystems #productdesign #podcast

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Half of the survey data you see on LinkedIn is probably wrong. That’s because saying something like “27% of young Aussie’s think chocolate milk is the best flavour”, is quantitative data that is basically impossible for anybody to prove wrong. In fact - it’s so easy to arrive at flawed data in surveys that in many cases it may as well be made up. I mean case in point. I have no idea if 27% or 50% of young Aussies really do like choco milk. But it’s mighty compelling hey? As Erika Hall says: “That is why surveys are so dangerous. They are so easy to create and so easy to distribute, and the results are so easy to tally. And our poor human brains are such that information that is easier for us to process and comprehend feels more true.” So at Backpocket we’re trying something a little different. We’re releasing our latest qualitative research data, for free, in our latest insights report - GenZ money, mates and music. Yes less stats, but far more real words and thoughts from genuine young Aussies. Want to know what GenZ are thinking about ticket prices, payment plans and music festivals? Comment or DM me for a copy!

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Question for service design contacts - Has anyone come across a "Design System" or something similar for non-digital services? I'm wondering how to go about creating basically a list of practical design features for creating accessible and inclusive community services. I've heard about "design systems" in UI being a way to create a consistent visual experience by listing standard components and elements that work so people don't keep reinventing the wheel. I know there are really good ones out there for creating accessible and inclusive digital services. And I sort of want to create something similar for non-digital services - like health services, support groups, things like that. I'm currently compiling lots of tips from lots of different sources, and I want to be able to share that research in a way that's easy to use. Does something like that already exist? Or does anyone have any thoughts on how to make that work? #ServiceDesign #DesignSystems #Accessibility #A11y #HealthAndCare #EDI

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I wrote a little something for Lyft Design+. It provides a bit of insight into the our Design System team and our process. If that sort of thing tickles your fancy give it a read, like or share. Have you contributed to a design system before? If so, I’d love to hear about your biggest learnings and the challenges you faced along the way. https://lnkd.in/dfiMMBU5

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